TV: The Recruit, Season 2

Neophyte Owen Hendricks is again caught up in nasty espionage games

CIA Chief Counsel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) guiding his fraught lawyer/agent (Noah Centineo)

TV: The Recruit, Season 2

Streaming on Netflix

That Owen! The scrapes he gets into! Whoa! A bullet just whizzed past his head. Bad guys never shoot exactly straight when they aim at him. It reminds me of how a Season 1 co-worker countered when Owen called himself skillful, “What you are, is lucky.”

That’s what anyone coming back for Season 2 of The Recruit might be thinking as hapless 24-year-old CIA lawyer Owen Hendricks (Noah Centineo) once again gets in way over his head.

He stumbles into assignments to cover up agency blunders whose perils he doesn’t begin to understand. And gets in so deep his boss, CIA Chief Counsel Walter Nyland (Vondie Curtis-Hall), can’t pull him out.

That’s the show’s giddy, quite implausible premise and it makes for even more fun this second time around. The setup here is more rapid, and the complications are even knottier. Owen’s only been in the job for a month. He has to adapt or die.

In six whirling episodes, Owen is bamboozled by bad people as well as by colleagues with mixed motives. Pretty much all the people out to deceive or kill him secretly want to rat out or eradicate one another, too.

The dizziness begins in the Czech Republic, where cold-blooded assassin Nichka (Maddie Hasson, in an expertly frosty performance) is ready to kill Owen before he can reveal that she’s a hired killer for clients around the globe.

Nichka is stopped when CIA operative Dawn (Angel Parker) arrives, rescues Owen and captures Nichka (who won’t stay captive long).

Ordered home, Owen is confined to his office. He opens an envelope addressed to his now-dead predecessor and it contains graymail – a threat to leak covert plans – whose source in South Korea warns he’ll put CIA secrets on CNN.

Owen, whose late father was stationed in Korea, is fluent in the language and convinces Nyland to let him fly there to confront the graymailer.

But he can only go if he takes actual CIA agent Janus Ferber (Kristian Brunn) to watch over him. Back from Season 1, Janus is the ultimate cynic/survivor in the CIA and has no patience with Owen’s starry idealism. His gleeful sarcasm is even wickeder this season, and Brunn delivers his lines with the whack of a machete.

Yet it’s Owen’s good heart that makes him want to help the graymailer, Korean spy Jang Kyun (Teo Yoo). But Owen’s job is at stake since Kyun threatens to expose CIA secrets to force the agency to help him find his wife, who’s been kidnapped to Russia.

Korean intelligence officers worry that Kyun may expose their country’s secrets, too, since he’s unaware that the U.S. and Korea are in cahoots sending a dangerous cryptocurrency into the world. Both nations want both men stopped – elimination is not ruled out

The action is full throttle, as Owen and Kyun try to keep ahead of their agencies’ efforts to rein them in.

The icy Nichka (Maddie Hasson) double-crosses spy agencies for sport — and cash

To dodge that outcome, the two reluctant allies need help from the cruelly manipulative Nichka. For cold hard cash she’ll use her contacts in the Kremlin to locate Kyun’s wife. Nichka learns she’s being held in Vladivostok by a Russian arm of the organized crime enterprise The Yakuza.

The narrative pivots multiple times per episode, so being back in a country he knows well gives Owen a leg up. A childhood friend is still fond of him and when Owen and his allies need a boat to Russia, she commandeers her fisherman father’s craft.

Aside from the boldly staged action, what’s most compelling here is Centineo’s effervescence in the role of a lawyer who doesn’t want to be a spy but keeps getting shot at as if he is one.

Naive and unsuspecting at every turn, Owen has to make us believe he has just enough gravitas, along with his luck, to make him believably outsmart bad guys and agency “friends”, all of whom know more about down and dirty espionage than he does.

Centineo never makes Owen completely clueless so, fortunately for the fast-paced action, we’re willing to overlook some too-convenient escapes and life-threatening twists Owen overcomes before we’ve quite understood what they were.

That some of his escapes are comically illogical, and both agents and hired killers sometimes float a witticism before aiming a boot at a groin or pulling a trigger, gives the show a breezy lilt.

Dire circumstances can also come across more frothy than nail-biting because Cintineo is a charming actor with enough boyishness to seem out of his depth, yet with the cojones to charge ahead without knowing what traps lie ahead.

Noah and Jang Kyun (Teo Yoo) team up to free the Korean spy’s kidnapped wife

Cintineo is immensely helped by the subtle acting of Teo Yoo, who was so moving in Past Lives (2023) as a lovelorn Korean trying to reunite with a childhood sweetheart in America.

To the same calm grace he brought to that movie, he adds here a startling feel for macho toughness and a sprightly ease in action sequences and sly espionage. He’s both warm and cool here, a loving husband and a desperado who’ll do anything to win her freedom.

Whether kicking opponents in the crotch or calmly lying to his spy agency superiors, Yoo shows another dimension to his talent. Add to that his tenderness toward his wife, and we see a beautifully expanded range in an actor whose promise is being amply fulfilled.

This season sees Noah repeatedly flummoxed and ultimately exonerated, to be sure by the skin of his teeth, so a Season 3 cries out to be made.

For anyone who enjoyed Season 1, this fresh outing will keep you rooting for the often confused but never down for the count Owen. Reluctant spying is making Owen both sadder and wiser. We’ve got to see him rise from that slump. Bring on more bad luck! Owen will be all the better for it.